FreeBSD I LOVE YOU

[Matthias Buelow]

David Gerard wrote:

> So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other
> cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory.

My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, 
Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow.  A 
large factor here is the Xft font rendering (Ok, you could use xterm 
instead of gnome-terminal, or switch off antialiasing), which is 
unaccelerated (at least was then), and _brutally_ slow.  If you run 
something with copious output in gnome-terminal, it'll more or less lock 
up the entire machine.  I don't normally use Gnome, but evaluated it on 
that old machine for some reason that is of no interest here.  KDE is a 
bit faster, don't know why, but seems to use more RAM.  IMHO you need at 
least a 2.8 or 3GHz P-IV for that kind of desktop to get things to run 
well, and, in my experience, raw CPU power here is the dominating 
factor.  Of course these machines are still perfectly usable with 
windowmaker, or fvwm, or similar.

mkb.